Having called on EU and European authorities to take radical action to address unemployment among racial minority youths in the EU, I am both surprised and unsurprised to read in Paul Solman's interview with Andrew Sum that jobless rates for young black teens in the U.S. exceed 90% - about the same rate as jobless rates for Roma youth in Eastern Europe.
Clearly, the EU isn't the only continent that needs to take radical, concerted action to address unemployment among minority youth, who already face a number of barriers when it comes to accessing the labor market. With state and local governments buckling under financial pressures as a result of the financial crisis, college-educated workers displacing workers with high school diplomas and those with high school diplomas taking the jobs that those without a high school diploma would take, unemployment among the least advantaged in our society has soared.
